


Get Through

by shieldivarius



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Multi, Post-Episode: s01e11 The Magical Place, reaction fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-12
Updated: 2014-01-12
Packaged: 2018-01-08 12:32:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,837
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1132693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shieldivarius/pseuds/shieldivarius
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Phil tried to act the same. As though everything was normal. As though his belief hadn’t been shaken until fissures appeared in its deepest foundation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Get Through

Phil had changed.

A ridiculous observation, of course. Phil had _died_ , and experiencing violent death—your _own_ violent death—didn’t leave the mind unscathed.

But in the rippling aftermath of S.H.I.E.L.D. campuses worldwide going on high alert, Phil had changed again. He’d come to visit them at the Tower, for one thing; the first time he’d done so since they’d found out he’d survived Loki’s attack during the Chitauri invasion. Up and left his team without any notice, as far as she could tell.

And for another….

Natasha turned away from the window and the view of Park Avenue stretching south down below, attention called by a whimper from the bed. Pressed back against Clint, and still quite asleep in his clinging embrace, Phil’s face screwed up, lines drawn deep and tormented in the dim light of the room.

It wasn’t that Phil had never had nightmares before—she doubted a soul working for S.H.I.E.L.D. could claim that. Of course he had. It was that the nightmares had never before owned him so thoroughly. 

“Phil. Hey, c’mon,” Clint said, his voice gruff from being woken and dark with concern. With careful movements he slipped his limbs from around Phil, giving him space on the bed, keeping a hand on his shoulder. Natasha approached, first steps a silly skip-jog out of worry-born haste.

A sheen of sweat glistened on Phil’s forehead and his lips moved, slurred nonsense spilling from between them. “ _Please_ ,” he rasped.

Brow contorted, worry clutching at her gut and making her feel ill, Natasha shared a look with Clint.

Three nights of Phil here sleeping off his latest job, and three nights of the nightmares, but the begging…. They hadn’t heard that before.

“Phil,” Natasha prompted. She slid across the bed and sat on her heels, legs folded beneath her and a knee touching each man to form a triangle with their bodies. “You’re safe, Darling. You’re with us.”

When his eyes opened a long, painful moment after Natasha had spoken, it was with a flutter of eyelids and a choked inhalation, like he couldn’t get enough air but also couldn’t get enough room in his trachea for the necessary air to reach his lungs.

The sick, worried feeling in her gut tightened at the deep-seated agony that flickered in Phil’s eyes in the moment before he shook off the nightmare and came fully awake. He looked back and forth between them, sitting above and witness to this moment of weakness, and rolled over so they were looking at the back of his head.

_‘Your turn,’_ Clint mouthed, catching her eye. Natasha nodded. Clint bent forward and kissed Phil’s shoulder and then the top of his head before slipping from the room. He’d be back with snacks soon, but in an effort to avoid Phil feeling ganged up on, they’d been trying in shifts to urge him to tell them what had happened.

It hadn’t been successful so far, but the nightmares hadn’t been this bad, she was sure.

“You need to talk to us. We need to know what’s going on. We can _help_.”

He didn’t roll over to look at her. “You don’t need to worry about me.”

“ _Phil_ ,” she snapped.

He _did_ turn over at that, and his eyes were bright. Propped up on an elbow, he reached out and took her hands in his. “’Tasha,” he murmured.

“Who were you pleading with?” she asked, trying to soften the bluntness of the words with a whisper.

Phil looked at once guilty—caught-out, like a child who’d done something he knew he wasn’t supposed to—embarrassed, and desperate to change the subject. She entwined her fingers with his. He stared down at their joined hands.

“I don’t want this to adversely affect you.”

Natasha frowned, not comprehending. “This is about you, not me.”

“I know, but I—“ he shook his head.

“Tell me,” Natasha urged.

The distant, almost vacant look and sadness set deep in his eyes told her he would rather not. She squeezed his hands, pressing his fingers between hers. He blinked, and the sadness transferred into the tight upturning of the corners of his lips. Holding his gaze locked with her own, Natasha gave a slow, encouraging nod.

Tension in his shoulders keeping him rigid, Phil started to talk. “They lied to us, about New York…”

By the end, the tension wracking his body had shifted into a quiver. Natasha held Phil’s head against her collarbone, carding her fingers through his hair and praying— _praying_ —he didn’t sit up unexpectedly and see the horrified expression on her face. She wouldn’t have been able to control it if he did.

Frozen, silent, she didn’t know if she had a hope of shedding that expression ever again.

Clint picked that moment to walk back into the bedroom. A bowl of chips in one hand, plate of sandwiches in the other, he nudged the door closed with his hip and went as far as setting the bowl and plate down on the end of the bed before he really looked at them. The immediate furrowing of his brow betrayed when he looked at them and registered what he was seeing.

He mouthed her name, making it a probing question with a look. Natasha, still running her fingers through Phil’s hair, still holding him to her chest, beckoned for Clint to come closer. He did, approaching from the side for all the good it would do, since Phil didn’t seem to have registered his return.

“Clint’s here,” Natasha whispered. Clint touched Phil’s arm, a brush of his fingers against bare skin. Phil’s hand shifted, searching and grasping at the air until it found Clint’s thigh and held on. 

“You’re shaking,” Phil said. The quiver wracking his body carried over into his voice.

“That’s you, Darling,” Natasha murmured.

He made a quiet noise, half grunt, half acknowledgement, that might have been an _‘oh’_ of recognition. As if to try and control the quaking he tensed up in her arms a moment later, fingers turning white-knuckled where they pressed into Clint’s leg. 

Finding enough control to school her features into something less horrified, Natasha rested her cheek against the top of Phil’s head. She dropped her hand from his hair to his shoulders and massaged the taut muscles there with her fingertips.

Clint looked bewildered and more than a little perturbed by the change in dynamic that had happened in his absence, but he covered Phil’s hand with his own and held on. 

Snacks forgotten, they sat that way until Phil gave into his exhaustion and sleep reclaimed him, only a little of the tension sliding from his body as he succumbed. With Clint’s help, Natasha guided Phil back down onto the bed and pulled the blankets over him.

Then she slipped from the bed, leaving the two of them lying together, and exited the room.

 

Natasha didn’t set out to avoid Phil the next day but it happened that way, regardless. Phil acted the same as he had since coming to the Tower—as though his confession in the middle of the night hadn’t happened. As though everything was normal, even if he was different. As though his belief hadn’t been shaken until fissures appeared in its deepest foundation.

Natasha couldn’t. 

She tried, and in that farce knew she had everyone but Clint and Phil fooled—Clint and Phil who knew what to look for. And Natasha couldn’t help but think about Phil’s worry for her and how she would react to what S.H.I.E.L.D. had done to him.

“Natasha.”

She tensed, then turned and smiled at him. A weak attempt at placating him, at making him think that everything was fine and they didn’t need to have the conversation they stood on the brink of. A sad look sat in Phil’s eyes. 

“Can we talk?” he asked. She didn’t have any choice but to nod and let Phil guide her out of the living room and to the privacy of the balcony beyond.

“This isn’t about me,” she said, before he could start. “My issues. My past. This is about you and your present.”

“You know that isn’t true,” he said, calling her bluff.

She leaned her elbows against the balcony rail and stared at the city below. “S.H.I.E.L.D. was supposed to be better,” she whispered. This, _this_ , was why Phil hadn’t wanted her and Clint—but especially her—to know what he’d learned about his survival. His willingness to bottle it all up was born of… what? The fear that she would leave? Flee?

It had crossed her mind for the briefest of moments the previous night. She had nowhere to go, though. Clint and Phil were her family, now, as entangled with S.H.I.E.L.D. as they were, and she owed _everything_ to them. 

Phil laid his hand between her shoulder blades. “We’ve broken our promise to you.”

“Not you,” she said. “And I do know better, Phil.” 

“I know you do,” he said. He sounded sad, and lost, and when she turned to him those expressions were clear and unmasked on his face. 

She cupped his cheeks in her hands. “This is harder for you to learn than for me,” she said. She placed a kiss on his nose, and then caught his lips in hers. “You trusted the system. Trusted that S.H.I.E.L.D. were good. Morally righteous.”

“I thought you—“

She shushed him. “I place my trust in individuals, not systems. I’m more comfortable on a mission without an evac plan than I am when knowing there is one. The trust I have in you, and in Clint, can’t be shaken by knowing that there are ethical gaps in the system. That is what the system _is_.”

“I trusted the system,” he said.

“And it took advantage of that trust. I know,” she said. 

He stared at her, eyes wide and glassy, shining with the edge of tears he wouldn’t let fall. She gathered him in her arms and held him. Phil wasn’t a naïve man, but his need to look for the best in people, to see their strengths as being able to overcome their weaknesses, made him a trusting one. 

When he had recovered from this, if he could recover from this, he would see where the parallels between her childhood and his present splintered. He would understand that it wasn’t hard for her to still operate under S.H.I.E.L.D.’s jurisdiction and the protection they offered her without trusting them. 

Her scepticism was in tact. Phil’s would take a while to rebuild, and Clint… well, Clint would come around once he shook the reflexive anger stewing within him at learning what had happened. 

They would get through this. 

A wet splash hit her bare collarbone and she felt Phil’s breathing hitch.

Somehow, they would get through this.

**Author's Note:**

> _I take it back I didn't want to know._
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> http://shieldivarius.tumblr.com


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